As the season changed over, we saw the last of the meteor showers fade away. While the short term emergency was over, I knew this would not be the end of it. Looking up at the sky, I could still see the way the ring had been changed by the enormous magical explosion, appearing broken in the sky. There was a gouge cut out of the ring with a faint halo of disrupted crystal, which had been the cause of the storm. Our respective orbits were now moving the world and the disruption away from each other, but I had no idea if or when we would meet again.
Based on what I could remember about how the rings formed around Saturn, it was actually a rapid process, and not only measured by astronomical timescales. If Saturn’s rings were, in fact, formed due to tidal forces destroying an orbiting moon, models suggested the rings could have formed in months or even days once the moon passed the Roche limit. The fact that this ring had not already recovered spoke to something else at play, interfering with the process, likely something magical.
Even without any more collisions, the world now had massive deposits of magic crystal which could be mined and utilized. With more magic flowing in the ecosystem, there were more evolved beasts coming into existence every day which would form more magic crystals within. While I would still classify it as a non-renewable resource—unless our orbit brought us back within the destruction halo for repeat disasters—there was enough at present to help jumpstart the magical industrialization I had started working on over the past years, bringing the costs down to improve the quality of life for the average citizen.
It was clear we would need to expand the Adventurers Guild yet again to handle the new threats and also possibilities that had arisen from the ringfall disaster, and people were sent west to Mirut and east to Gurt to begin setting up branches there. We had long been talking about setting up a branch in Gurt, at least, to consolidate better with the Tamers Guild out east, but the distance had made it a lower priority before the recent events.
While communication devices and messenger birds helped close the distance a bit, and tarands had reduced the time to travel, there was still a limit to what people could do over those distances.
But 7-point magic changed that.
As with 3-point magic and 8-point magic, I was reluctant to outright teach people the new magic I had created. It was far too powerful and the risks of it being abused were too high. However, as I had done with 3-point magic, I could use it to create artifacts which could outlast me and enable people to do miraculous things that could benefit the Kingdom far into the future.
Before I could focus on that, I had a lot of other maintenance chores to do. Since I was not sharing 3-point magic, I first had to focus on creating more adventurer scales, dungeon compasses, and magic meters to meet the new needs.
I also spent time in discussions with my advisors, the Guilds, and the Church about streamlining the intake of dungeon core, magic crystal, producing health and magic potions, and the production of a “learning aid” potion out of skillfruit in order to supercharge a true education system.
Part of the issue in setting up an education system from scratch involved figuring out who to hire as teachers. With no education system in place, there was no way to teach prospective teachers what they needed to know in order to educate the children. The obvious place to pull from was the Church, since they acted in a childcare capacity already, but we also could not pull our healers from their roles of healthcare in order to meet the needs for education.
Not every priest apprentice turned out to be particularly capable when it came to healing. The rates had gone up quite a lot since the introduction of the magic meters, but across the Kingdom some naturally filled the role of childcare providers while performing less actual healing.
I began by constructing a general curriculum, and sitting down with some members of the Church to further dial it in based on what they had seen from the children over their years serving the community. Once we had a place to start from, it was handed off to the Church to begin preparing for. The creation of a formalized education system would not happen quickly. Instead, we began employing the ideals of an education system and the use of a formalized curriculum alongside successful teaching methods in how the Church approached future childcare.
Over the next generation of children, we would promote education, encouraging parents to ensure their children attended. The best priests for teaching would focus their efforts there, and in turn start selecting apprentices from that cohort specifically for apprenticeship in childcare and education.
In the same way we had created a post-apprenticeship mandatory healing residency in the Church in order for priests to earn their magic meters, we would require the same thing for prospective teachers. It was not realistic to take fifteen year old “adults” and have them teaching ten year olds. Instead, prospective teachers who finished their apprenticeship would be required to spend five years with the Church—and later, the school system—as a teaching assistant, working alongside an experienced teacher.
Ultimately, the teaching assistant would be given a full teaching position, at which point they could apprentice a future teaching assistant themselves. In this way, in approximately ten years, we would have the beginnings of an education staff to fully roll out a crown-sponsored school system as a separate entity from the Church, allowing the Church to evolve more exclusively towards healthcare and civic affairs.
The future school system would continue to work with the Church for magic training while also working with the Guilds in order to facilitate training in physical education and beast care. In the short term, I would continue having Rena grow skillfruit from the Tamers Guild, but it would ultimately shift to a specialized operation that was adjacent to the school system and the Church, who I had put in charge of the dungeon core and red crystal acquisition. The proceeds from paid community healing would go back into the community by paying out Guild bounties for cores, which in turn would be used to create healing potions for the Guilds and the community, as well as skillfruit fertilizer potions for raising the next generations.
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The excess profits would still make their way to the crown, but as it stood the crown already had a truly massive amount of wealth that it was sitting on that was not helping the Kingdom develop at all. A more active economy was better for everyone, rather than consolidating more wealth at the top, particularly if those in power did not use that wealth for the betterment of all.
Once the details had been ironed out, I returned to focusing on magical industrialization. Several massive magic crystals had already been discovered by adventurers, and the crown acquired one so I could start experimenting with it alongside my crafting team.
“Hmm,” I muttered, looking at the large hunk of beast crystal.
“It cuts well enough,” one of the crafters said, sawing through an experimental piece. “But the mounts we made for the iceboxes are designed to accept spheres, after the deepwater pearls.”
“We’ve shaped beast crystal into spheres before, grinding them into shape, and that works, but it makes a lot of waste,” another chimed in.
“Well, not waste, exactly,” the first crafter interjected. “The ground crystal can still be used for potion making.”
“Right,” the other concurred. “But using pearl-shaped spheres just doesn’t make sense to maximize how much use we can get out of a large crystal like this.”
“We can change the mounts to take cubes instead,” I said, tapping my chin. “We should standardize cube sizes. Then we can scale artifacts to the size of the cubes. We can probably make iceboxes with twice as much cold potential with a cube that has twice as much mass as our standard, whatever that ends up being. Or perhaps allow a standardized icebox to run for twice as much time before needing a replacement cube.”
Thus began the long process of experimentation and measurement, trying to dial in the best value for our magical cube units, and comparing them to the ranking of the same amount of crystal applied to a recovery potion, as well as working with the Tamers Guild to compare them against the necessary crystal to trigger beast evolution.
After a surprisingly lengthy period of time which caused quite a lot of heated debate within my team of crafters, we finally honed in on the perfect size for our standard cube. This became our default battery, although I had to develop a word for it in Horuthian, a portmanteau of the Horuthian words for “magic” and “cube.”
“With the standard manufactured magicube now set, this also gives us a scale against which we can measure natural sources like deepwater pearls and beast crystals,” I mused as I held up the final version of our product. “Different shapes do have different use-cases, so we should still consider using pearls for some things, but now we can grade them in the same way we grade potions.”
The new battery mount would accept the magical cubes such that they sat in the mount with one corner of the cube in contact with the 2-point circle that transferred the magic into the artifact, when activated. This meant that any sized cube could be slotted into an artifact mount point, since every size cube had the same angles, the same as how any sized sphere had the same contact point when nestled into a flexible or oversized mount. A cubic battery that was far outsized for a standard slot would probably weigh too much to sit in the mount properly without tipping out, but it would give the user of the artifact some flexibility in what size they wished to purchase and use depending on their finances and needs.
From there, we began constructing the magical refrigerators in earnest. We designed several different standard sizes for these iceboxes, with the smallest being designed around a single standard battery as something of a minifridge and the largest being a convoy-scale icebox that could run off a ten-charge cube.
I left the work in the capable hands of my crafters, once it was underway, as well as the plans for other artifacts we were planning on industrializing further, like water pumps. With that sorted, it was finally time for me to lean into my 7-point magic experiments.
Artifacts which could replicate my inventory ability would completely change what mages could do. Without my inventory, I would have been significantly more limited in combat as a mage who used stone when I was growing up. Estorra’s limitation had been her water supply, which was only barely managed thanks to Sidel and Tug, but an inventory would have given her far more flexibility. For a fire mage, like Vorel had been, having a constant source of carbon fuel on hand would be paramount.
Bags of holding or storage rings or some other inventory artifact would change more than just provide mage’s fuel for their elemental magic. It would give solo hunters far more capacity to hunt and bring back meat. It would change shipping dramatically. It would both give owners of inventory artifacts security while also reducing the security of others; after all, I had once stolen potions from Belat, which I had only got away with thanks to my inventory. While I paid her back for it in the end, thieves and criminals with inventories would be less scrupulous.
If they were commonplace, or at least known, that could limit some of the downsides. Since they would be tied to artifacts, they could simply be disallowed inside commercial establishments. They could be searched by authority figures, if needed.
The concerns gave me pause, though I was sure I would ultimately create some for my friends and family. For the moment, I focused my attention on something else that would change the Kingdom.
Pulling out a piece of parchment, I began sketching the design of the physical object, the engraving necessary for the industrialization, and taking some notes on potential wordings for the enchantment by drawing from what I had already learned about creating paired artifacts like the communication devices. These artifacts would obviously be bigger, but the core idea was fairly similar. The main difference was that it would be sending a lot more than just thoughts across the Kingdom.
When the light started to fade, I stretched and decided to call it a day. Before I put my notes away, I scribbled a title in the top corner of the parchment: the teleportation gate.